graphic design

“Shaka” or “Shaka, brah!” Maybe you’ve heard this expression. Maybe you’ve uttered those words in earnest salutation or ironically. Maybe you’re a core surfer living on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii, and these words are your go-to, standard form of salutation. You use it all time without even reallyContinue Reading

One of our current projects here at Global Graphic is a music collaboration turned band called Aloha Death. We’ve just released our second tune! It’s called “Shibuya” (Yay!!!) and you can find it now on iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc. Check out the band website for more details. In the meantime, follow AlohaContinue Reading

The cat’s out of the bag! It’s true, some of the Global Graphica squad are musicians. In fact, they (we) are musicians who write songs and record those songs too! We’ve been loosely collaborating for a while now on music for various projects, but have now officially formed a band.Continue Reading

Yes, savvy reader, it’s true. Almost everybody’s favorite Seattle, Washington-based, international speciality-coffee chain has a design flaw in its familiar, if not ubiquitous, mermaid logo. Can you spot it? Do you see it? What is it? Look closely at the logo. (And c’mon now — don’t Google the answer! WeContinue Reading

This shit for real, y’all. Coca-Cola, the global mega-brand and carbonated soft drink, is getting a slightly new look. It’s changing the typeface used in all its branding and design to a new, bespoke font. It’s big news, so sit down and take moment, if you need one, savvy reader. Continue Reading

Our annual New Year’s ritual of doing some house cleaning and organizing, throwing things out and making room for all the stuff we got as Xmas gifts, yielded this small trove of matchbooks and matchboxes. We must have picked up these from various restaurants and shops because the designs struckContinue Reading

The current mural at the “Bowery Wall” (a.k.a., the “Deitch Wall”) in downtown New York City is an epic, colorful composition of 3D block letters and abstract 2D graphical shapes. The massive painting is by the artist Lakwena and its message “Lift you higher” could be describing the artwork itself.Continue Reading

We found this street art on a local newspaper box in the kinda gritty, kinda hipster Kaimuki neighborhood of Honolulu. It’s a further sign of continuing gentrification of this drab suburban patch on Oahu’s south shore. Truly, there’s trouble brewing in paradise. The opening of more high-quality third-wave expresso bars isContinue Reading

Hands-down the the Hawaiian Airlines airplane branding is the sexiest ever in the goddamn history of the world. Period. It’s expressed on the tails of its aircraft as a graphical image of a young Hawaiian (we presume Hawaiian) woman shown in profile with a flower in her fair. Seeing herContinue Reading

Many years ago, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was travelling two or three times a year from the U.S. through the Southeast Asian city state of Singapore. These trips were usually en route to Australia and Papua New Guinea to visit family and makeContinue Reading

The ever-gentrifying Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles is home to lots of large-scale street art, including this classic Shepard Fairey politically-tinged mural on Alameda Street behind the Angel City Brewery. The artwork depicts the late U.S. president Ronald Reagan holding a sign that says “Legislative influence for sale.” ItsContinue Reading

For years we would see the wheat-pasted artwork of artist Spazmat posted around downtown New York City. His posters were unmissable. His street art was comprised of an iconic image: An illustrated portrait of a skeleton with a cell phone in its bony hand held up to the skull asContinue Reading

When you aim a video camera at a live video projection generated from the same camera in real time, the results are fascinating and in the right circumstances can created biological-like patterns akin to “brain coal,” as seen in the above screenshot and video below, which was made by EthanContinue Reading

This wheat-pasted street art of two dogs is awesomely colorful and cute. It’s also tiny, smaller than the palm of a hand. It’s miniature street art, which is cool. But it would be even cooler if it was the size of a small building, because the artwork itself is beautifuContinue Reading

The logo for Intelligentsia Coffee’s “Black Cat” Espresso is the head of a black cat. It’s a bold and literal graphic with class and style, rendered so that the cat’s head is seen from a 3/4-angle, giving it some visual dimensionality. Intelligentsia has put the Black Cat logo on someContinue Reading

We recently went to a series of meetings at a creative agency in Southern California. The walls of the conference room where the meetings were held were covered in wheat-paste street art. Most of the artwork was boldly illustrated black-and-white poster cut-outs of hand-drawn graphics in a comic style. OurContinue Reading

On a recent visit to the Arcana bookstore in Culver City, in Los Angeles, we checked out some beautiful coffee-table books on surfing and surf photography. Among these was a book titled “Surfing San Onofre to Point Dume: 1936-1942.” It’s a collection of sepia-toned photos by Don James documenting his surfingContinue Reading

We have a hunch that the message in this typographic garage-door mural by artist Adam Mars may be an accurate description of the person residing in this Venice Beach home. Using our powers of imagination, we picture this “highly successful beach bum” as a man in his early forties, with tousled,Continue Reading

We’ve seen these mysterious circular stickers of a boy’s face around Los Angeles in recent weeks. The face is drawn in a style that reminds of the graphic novels of Charles Burns. There’s something a little creepy about the face. The eyes are beady and suggest evil thought. The stark blue-on-black drawing addsContinue Reading